The Joy of Killing (10 page)

“We know about Judy Pauling,” the flat-eyed cop said calmly.

I glanced at the photo on the glass top. I could smell the sweat in the small of her back. Why would David tell them about her, except to save his own skin? She had been his idea, too. I could feel myself weaken. Then get pissed. This shit would get all around school, the whole town.

“Her dad's not too happy,” the cop continued. “Says you fucked his daughter. She's thirteen years old.”

“We didn't,” I said.

The cop smiled. “Really? That's not what she says.”

I could hear voices from the kitchen. Mom was nailing the poor guy.

Still eyes leaned in a little. “Your parents don't have to know about Judy,” he said. “Just between us.”

I
NOTICE THE
“a” in “fedora” is stuck in blood. I punch the key a couple of times. I hook the letter with my fingernail and release it, and it snaps back into place. I tap the letter; it sticks again.

The girl on the train wanted what she wanted, and I was handy, I understand that. But that's how love happens, isn't it? The minute she descended on me both of our breaths caught, and we held there for an instant, until she closed her eyes and exhaled in a soft sound of pleasure. Her hands pressed into my shoulders. She lifted up a little, and I could feel the tug of her. I glanced at her image in the window; her head was back, her throat exposed. I touched it, let my fingers slide up and down, until my thumb and forefinger closed lightly on the ridges. I pressed in a little, and then tightened the touch. Her eyes opened in a cauldron of heat. “Do it,” she
whispered. My hips jerked into her. She bucked, and I slammed again, grasping her rear with both hands. Fingers slid around to touch the crack, which I could feel open with the pressure. “Good,” she whispered. Her hips rocked a little, massaging me. Back and forth, up and down, back and forth, up and down, until I would slam into her, pulling down on her hips at the same time, and she would hold and shudder a little, and I would stare at the whiteness of her throat reflected in the subtle starlight. I let go of watching and thinking about what I was seeing. I pushed in with my thumbs until I could feel the edge of her pubic hair. My thumbs slid down, touched the lips themselves. I spread the flesh apart, pressed onto the nub. “That's it,” she said. She lifted up until I was barely inside her. There she froze, shuddered, tossed her head back, rocked once, twice, and dropped down hard onto me, with a primitive moan. Her rear was quivering in my hands. Her head fell forward. She slowly brought her eyes into focus.

She whispered, “Did we wake anyone?”

“Only the baby,” I said.

A
LL KEYS ARE
now working, I note. And the bloodstained paper has been removed and a clean one inserted. Reading what I just wrote, I see the slenderest thread of something new, something more than sexual pleasure.

W
HEN DID
I decide to come here to the house on the lake? I sort back through the past several days. I dropped off Thesis—a long-haired orange male cat I'd had for five years—at a friend's house
with a bag of cat food and enough money for five years' worth of medical care and food. I unhooked my telephone and tossed the answering machine down the garbage chute in the hall. The hours after that are unclear, and they're gradually becoming less and less clear, which is all right. It's not the final days I seek to understand. I admit I didn't fuck Shelley Duvall, and so what if I was cheated of the experience of having taken another's life? If the images would simply hold in pattern, march across the sky in some sort of order, to an end yet unseen but certainly there. They never have before, I chastise myself, why would you think they might now? I shake my head over the fact that I could have driven all the way up here to the little village and stood on the front porch of our vacation house and looked the caretaker in the eye before I remembered Joseph. Jesus, I could remember the color of Judy Pauling's eyes, picture the amused look on David's face when I finally confronted him about the detectives.

A
FTER DROPPING OFF
Thesis, I parked the old Chevy convertible in front of my second wife's apartment, with a note on the windshield, and called a cab from a corner grocery. A chattering Somali driver took me to the only car rental place in Booneville. I thought of stopping by David's print shop. It wasn't necessary, I told myself. But it would be right, I thought. Jar the story into its final reality.

In fact, I would like to see Joseph and search out the truth of what happened the long-ago afternoon of his demise. Once he'd left in the canoe, we seemed to forget all about him. Someone
would call out a game—first one across the river and back—and then someone another game—who could dive farthest out from the dock—until we were on the verge of fatigued hysteria. My shoulders were burned and I had a slice on the bottom of my foot, but I wouldn't be the first one to quit. Finally, someone said, “Hey, where's Joseph?” The sun had slid to the top of the pines, and the air was cooling. We looked out over the lake. No sign of him. Sally shot a glance at me, as if I were somehow complicit because I had gone over with him a few days earlier. We walked to the edge of the lake for a better view, searched for a shadow on the water. The life jacket lay flat on the sand. I backed up a few feet. It struck me that Sally might suggest that we, or at least I, jump in the second canoe and go look for him. “He probably stayed over there, at the camp,” I said. “I would have. Look.” I pointed at a dark blotch spreading in the middle of the lake. A good squall could dump a sizeable sailboat, not to mention a canoe. The others agreed. Sally stared at the water, glanced up at the sky, now darkening, and took off in a dead run in the direction of her family's cabin.

A
READING LIGHT
flicked on a few rows ahead. People rustled about in their seats. An elderly lady wearing a dark shawl padded up the aisle to the restroom. The only sound was the relentless clickety-clack of the steel wheels skipping over the cracks in the steel rails, and the steady breathing of the sleeping girl, whose head lay on my chest. Outside, the sky had deepened, although the moon was not to be seen. Dark forms flew by like ghosts. The girl sighed gently, as if she were in a sweet dream. Her hand rose to my neck,
and her fingers spread wide. I breathed in the strange smell of sex. I closed my eyes and allowed myself to drift with the sensations. The clinking sound of the Zippo opening brought me around. I cracked an eye: it was the elderly lady, lighting a cigarette with my lighter. She glanced at us as she puffed, and then padded on down the aisle. The peace of our little capsule was shattered by a shaft of light flashing around the inside of the car. Racing around a curve up ahead was a jittery white moon. Two whistles screamed in unison. The girl stirred. I brushed her hair back. Her eyes opened.

“Another train,” I said.

Around the white eye you could barely make out a ring of black steel. The monster was aimed right at our very gut; it would lift us off the tracks and toss us over. The girl shifted in her seat, and her arms tightened around me. The white eye lit us up like ghosts. At the last moment it screeched a few degrees off, and I could feel the whoosh of the air as the black steel flashed by. Not a separation of more than ten feet, I thought. The girl sat up. The twin whistles shrieked again, and the trains rocked violently. The metal racketing vibrated the skin on my face. I placed a hand on the window. The girl placed one next to it. Boxcars flashed between our thumbs.

N
OW THE SPACE
key on the typewriter has stopped working. I tap it, nothing, so I tap it harder and still nothing. So, it will all run together. I hold my finger up in front of the space where the key hits and punch a key, which whacks my finger, and the carriage moves one space. It'll take too long. Still, I feel the beginning edge of a peaceful wave. I've lived long enough to get a good taste of life.
Fifty-five years, two wives, no children, a novel, a variety of lovers, lots of blind alleys, vivid moments of piercing insight, walls of sightlessness. Friends, of a sort. Students who went out of their way to express gratitude, although fewer in the latter years, when my emphasis shifted to the nature and origin of violence in the human animal. I weaved relentlessly toward an inescapable determinism, which, if followed faithfully, could only lead one to conclude that there is no such thing as moral responsibility.

I would nod to one of the football players in the class and ask: Suppose you were born with this need for very young girls. Would you not curse the god who made you that way? Would you not change yourself if you could? You wouldn't believe it was your choice, would you? Are we not helpless in the face of our fate? As we did not make ourselves, so we cannot change ourselves. All else is delusion. The discomfort on the students' faces usually began to show by the second class.

“So what would you do with the guy who rapes little girls?” a student asked in frustration.

“What would you do?” I responded.

“Give him the death penalty. Kill him.”

“To make yourself feel better.”

“To stop him from doing it again.”

“Life in prison would do that.”

“He deserved it.”

“But his death would make you feel better, wouldn't it?”

I could never understand their reluctance to admit the obvious. It's why we do everything we do.

“Uh-huh.”

And on it went. Several of the girls and one or two boys dropped the class. Others added when the word got out. I experimented with different methods of making what I thought was a fairly simple and obvious point: nothing transcends nature, nothing exists outside it, or is separate from it. I would pose a hypothetical. Imagine, I told a student, that you have a six-year-old daughter. One night you are awakened to a noise; you search the house and find her missing from her bedroom. You grab a knife from the kitchen. You find a man holding her on the floor in the garage behind your house. The man has her knees apart and is bending over her.

I kept the story going in vivid detail, until finally the student jumped to his feet, raised the knife overhead, and lunged at the figure on the floor. With a cry, he brought the blade down into the man's back. Several women began weeping. Others looked away or walked out. I later asked those who remained to write up their version of the incident and their reaction to it. No one felt anything for the man; no one, despite my imprecations, saw him simply as the product of a careless or ill-intentioned creator. Suppose it was a python who had wrapped itself around the girl as she slept in her crib and squeezed the life from her? I asked. Would you blame the python? Would you fall into a fit of rage and stab it full of holes? No? Why not? Nature, they'd reply, as if man himself were somehow unnatural.

T
HE SENTENCES ARE
beginning to have a frantic feel to them, as if they might tumble off the end of the paper. I raise the cover
and poke around inside, until I find a little rod that seems to have slipped out of its hole. I manage to force it back in. Tap, tap. The space key works. My fingers are covered with ink. I wipe them on my pants and see what looks like a red stain just above the knee on the right leg. I poke at it with a thumb; it's dry, but not crusty. I press in and feel a sharp pain. I sort back through the day. Not surprisingly, my narrative is sparse and uneven. The gaps are spaces with no hints around the edges. The cat. The car. A hot midday sun with a thread of cool air in it. My briefcase on the kitchen table. An open newspaper next to it. On the kitchen counter I see a sharp wide blade attached to a black handle with two rivets in it, sticking point-up from the utensil box on the dish rack. I squint in my mind, trying to collect the pieces, sort out the puzzle. I had awoken this morning to a cool autumn sun. I was writing an article for
Human Nature
magazine on the wellspring of human motivation, but I had lingered beyond the submission date and had found within myself little desire to bend back into it. It seemed like a woman had crept from the bed in the first edge of dawn and slipped into her clothes and out of the room. But whom? The sun was midway up the east window by the time I swung out of bed. The slanting rays lit the living room on fire, yet the wood floors were still cold. Draft pages of my article were scattered on the living room floor as if flung about by a child. Two chairs were pulled out at the round breakfast room table by the front window. At each place was an empty wine glass. Then the briefcase, and the newspaper, laying half open. It didn't add up. I didn't feel a woman on my skin. Taste her. I picked up a wine glass, spotted a coral smudge on the rim. Of course.
She always wore the same color. I could hear the door close, the high heels clacking down the wooden stairs. I walked into the small kitchen and set the glasses in the pocked porcelain sink. Thesis brushed through my legs. Sun-fire caught the blade of the knife. It was incredibly beautiful. I flicked a finger down the edge.

The flow of images is, as always, somewhat suspect. I remember feeding Thesis from a half-empty tin of tuna in the fridge, then stepping to the window. The scene outside was very bright, almost painfully so, and the street seemed quite distant, as if of another world. A woman in a station wagon pulled into a spot in front of the small grocery next to the café and got out. I looked more closely. I recognized the thick chestnut hair pulled back and woven into a single braid, the gentle sway in her thin body as she stepped on the curb. Years ago her son had taken my Philosophy of Violence class. She had come to my office to talk about his reaction to the content. She was more curious than upset. Had I been subject to violence as a child? Did I believe violence was a natural state or behavior? My answers must have turned her on, for we ended up having sex on my desk. Her sweaty bottom printed on the proof of an article I was editing. The next year the school installed window air conditioners.